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I never gave a hoot about the ING NYC Marathon until last year, which was just after my first race ever in October. Suddenly, watching other people run for two+ hours was interesting. But I didn’t follow racing then, so had no idea who the people running were.

This year’s different. Our house is abuzz with excitement this morning (or, at least, as abuzz with excitement as a two person household can be at 7:30AM on a Sunday), as we await the start of televised coverage of the 2006 event. There are so many great runners in it this year that’s it’s truly impossible to predict who will win.

Apparently Deena Kastor is plastered across every bus and subway in the city right now. I’m wondering if she gets a USA win (and/or Meb Keflezighi — or Alan Culpepper, or Katie McGregor for that matter) if that will boost interest in (and television coverage) of the bigger marathons. I would loved to lie on the couch and watch the Boston or Chicago marathons, for example. But, alas, I would need couches in those cities to do so.

As for our own, considerably less spectacular efforts…

We took a couple of hours yesterday to drive up to Rockland State Park to check out the course for a 5 mile “turkey trot” we’re doing on Thanksgiving. We just did an easy run around the course so we’d know what to expect.

It’s in the same park where I ran my best 10K time in the spring, although the course is different for the first 1.75 miles — lots of hills, some of them quite long, on local streets, then flattening out when you enter the park and run around a lake. It’s also a huge race, relatively speaking: there were over 1,000 people running it last year.

Given the hills, I don’t think it’ll be my best race. But it should be enough to work off some of the pumpkin bread I plan to make.

We noticed another race on the Westchester Track Club calendar…a 5K/10K race in Hastings on November 19. Might do that one too, as Hastings is quite hilly and a 10K would be a good early hill workout equivalent.

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Instead of the Hastings-on-Hudson 5K, consider the Mamaroneck Turkey Trot on Nov. 19. Very nice 5-miler. Flat course, with a tough finishing stretch (along the Post Road). It’s on the WTC calendar as well. The application is here.

Also, don’t know about Boston, but Chicago this year was available on-line via the local station’s web-site. Not great, but the feed/stream was actually pretty good.